The Civil War: Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address

The Civil War: Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address

BY TIM BAILEY

UNIT OVERVIEW Over the course of five lessons students will closely read and analyze Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. They will select key words from the text, write succinct summaries of selections from the text, restate these summaries in their own words, and ultimately write a short persuasive essay in response to a thought-provoking prompt based on the document.

UNIT OBJECTIVES Students will be able to ? Identify and explain key words and important phrases in a historical text ? Explain and summarize the meaning of a historical text, on both literal and inferential levels ? Analyze the writing style of an author based on close reading ? Develop a viewpoint and write a persuasive (argumentative) essay, supported by evidence from a historical text

NUMBER OF CLASS PERIODS: 4?5 Although this unit is designed for five class periods, it can be completed in a shorter time frame by reading more than one section of text per class and/or assigning some lessons as homework.

COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.1: Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.2: Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.4: Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 5 topic or subject area. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.5: Compare and contrast the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.6: Explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text, identifying which reasons and evidence support which point(s).

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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Civil War

Adapted from "The American Civil War" by Gary W. Gallagher, History Now, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,

The Civil War marked a defining moment in United States history. Long simmering sectional tensions reached a critical stage in 1860?1861 when eleven slaveholding states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Political disagreement gave way to war in April 1861, as Confederates insisted on their right to leave the Union and the loyal states refused to allow them to go. Four years of fighting resulted in almost 1.5 million casualties (of whom at least 620,000 died), directly affected untold civilians, and freed four million enslaved African Americans.

Questions relating to the institution of slavery set the stage for secession and war. Most men and women at the time would have agreed with Abraham Lincoln's assertion in his Second Inaugural Address that slavery "was, somehow, the cause of the war." Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president, minced no words when he proclaimed in March 1861 that slavery "was the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" to establish southern independence. Debates over the expansion of slavery into federal territories, which were tied to the South's effort to maintain an equal number of free and slave states, created turmoil in national politics.

Both sides mobilized on a scale unprecedented in American history. Drawing on an 1860 population of just more than 1,000,000 military-age white males, the Confederacy placed between 800,000 and 900,000 men in uniform (fragmentary records do not permit a precise count). The United States mustered at least 2.1 million men, about half of its 1860 military-age population. More than 180,000 African American men served in United States Army units and another 20,000 in the Navy. Apart from its much larger population, the United States held decided advantages in industrial capacity, commercial interests, and financial infrastructure.

Yet either side could have prevailed. The Confederacy sought independence and only had to defend itself. The United States sought to compel the seceded states to abandon their hopes to found a new nation. Union armies would have to invade the Confederacy, destroy its capacity to wage war, and crush the will of the southern people to resist. The Confederacy could win merely by prolonging the war to a point where the loyal citizenry considered the effort too costly in lives and money.

Military fortunes ebbed and flowed for more than three years before United States forces gained a decisive advantage. The loyal states wavered more than once in their determination, most notably after Robert E. Lee frustrated Union offensives in the spring of 1863 and the spring and early summer of 1864. A string of Union successes won by Ulysses S. Grant in the West at Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga in 1862?1863, and by William Tecumseh Sherman at Atlanta in 1864, more than counterbalanced Lee's successes. By the autumn of 1864, with Grant as the Union general in chief, United States armies applied pressure in Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas that eventually forced a Confederate surrender in the spring of 1865.

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No group was more directly affected by the outcome of the war than the four million black people who were enslaved in 1861. They emerged from the struggle with their freedom (made final by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865), though the extent to which they would be accorded equal rights remained unresolved.

The cost of the war was appalling. More American soldiers lost their lives than in all other wars combined from the colonial period through the last phase of the Vietnam War.

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The Gettysburg Address

BY TIM BAILEY

The Battle of Gettysburg, July 1?3, 1863, was a turning point in the Civil War. The Union army defeated a Confederate army that had invaded the state of Pennsylvania. Over three days, a total of 150,000 troops participated in the battle; approximately 10,000 soldiers were killed or mortally wounded, 30,000 were injured, and 10,000 were captured or went missing. Four months later, 3500 of the Union dead were interred in a new national cemetery near the battlefield. Writing on behalf of Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin on November 2, 1863, David Wills invited President Abraham Lincoln to deliver a "few appropriate remarks" at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery on November 19. Only 272 words in length, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has become one of the most revered, memorable, and influential speeches in our nation's history.

The dedicatory program included several band and choir performances, memorial prayers, opening and closing benedictions, and a lengthy address of 13,600 words delivered over the course of two hours by Edward Everett, a clergyman who had served as a congressman, senator, and governor of Massachusetts, and as president of Harvard. Between two choral presentations, President Lincoln came to the podium before a crowd of 15,000. Although the President spoke very briefly, his words had lasting significance. On the following day, Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln stating, "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."

Without mentioning words like "Confederacy," "slavery," or "secession" in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln broadened the objectives of the Civil War to include not just preserving the Union as it was (with slavery largely intact in the South), but also achieving "a new birth of freedom" that would abolish slavery and, in the words of the Constitution, "form a more perfect union." The address reaffirmed the nation's founding principles, redefined the purpose of the Civil War, and transformed the American people's view of their country, government, and society.

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LESSON 1

OVERVIEW

Students will be asked to "read like a detective" to gain a clear understanding of the content of President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of 1863. By reading and analyzing the original text, the students will learn what is explicitly stated, draw logical inferences, and demonstrate their knowledge by writing a succinct summary of the text. In the first lesson this learning process will proceed as a whole-class exercise.

MATERIALS

? The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

? Summary Organizer #1

? Overhead projector, Smartboard, or other display device

PROCEDURE

1. Distribute copies of the Gettysburg Address. Resist putting the document into historical context as the students should draw conclusions directly from the text itself.

2. "Share read" the address with the students. This is done by having the students follow along silently while you begin to read aloud, modeling prosody, inflection, and punctuation. Ask the class to join in with the reading after a few sentences while you continue to read along with the students, still serving as the model for the class. This technique will support struggling readers as well as English language learners (ELL).

3. Distribute Summary Organizer #1. The activity sheet contains the first section of the Gettysburg Address. Display the organizer in a format large enough for all the students to see, and explain that in this lesson the whole class will work together to read and summarize the first section of the Gettysburg Address.

4. Share read the excerpt with the class.

5. Explain that the first step is to select "Key Words" from the text. Guidelines for Selecting Key Words: Key words are important to understanding the text. They are usually nouns or verbs. The students should not select "connector" words (are, is, the, and, so, etc.). The number of key words chosen depends on the length of the original selection. This selection is only thirty words, so you can pick four or five key words. Tell the students that they must know the meaning of the words they choose. You can take the opportunity to teach students how to use context clues, word analysis, and dictionary skills to discover word meanings.

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6. Students will now select four or five words from the text that they believe are key words and write them in the Key Words section of the organizer.

7. Survey the class to find out what the most popular choices are. You can write them down and have the class discuss the options and vote on the final choice, based on guidance from you. For example, the class might select the following words: new nation (you can allow a very short phrase if it makes sense as a unit), liberty, men, and equal. Now, no matter which words the students had previously chosen, have them write the words agreed upon by the class or chosen by you into the Key Words section.

8. Explain to the class that they will use the key words to write a sentence that summarizes Lincoln's message. This should be a whole-class negotiation process. For example, "The founders created a new nation of liberty where all men are equal." The students might decide they don't need some of the words to make the sentence even more streamlined. This is part of the negotiation process. The final sentence is copied into the organizer.

9. Now tell the students to restate the summary sentence in their own words. Again, this is a negotiation process. For example, "The founders started a country where everyone would be free and treated the same."

10. Wrap-up: Discuss vocabulary that the students found confusing or difficult. The students can keep a record of these words and their meanings on the back of the organizer or in a separate vocabulary form.

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